The Hartwig Art Production | Collection Fund: September and October exhibitions 2021 Further exhibitions will open in October, November and December 2021 and also in 2022. Neo Matloga: my hero is always next to me 4 September – 3 October Stroom Den Haag Hogewal 1-9, The Hague https://www.stroom.nl Neo Matoga’s work can be characterised as political, personal and universal. The South African artist is known for his monochromatic collages in which he presents diverse and vivid images that are at the same time loaded with intimacy and politics. Matloga was born in South Africa a year before the official end of apartheid (1994). In his collages he reworks images of his world, sometimes opting for intimate, joyful everyday moments between individuals, and sometimes for public, iconic and generally known imagery. Stories of love and belonging can exist in stark contrast to the ever-persistent reality of a society characterised by colonialism and racism. A tension that can always be felt in his work. Matloga's search for new imaginations is a combination of choreography, composition, and creative intuition. The visual material from media, magazines, photo albums and soap operas is distorted and painted over with ink, paint and liquid chalk. By cutting, tearing and building up different layers and stories, new connections are always created between past, present and future In this exhibition, Matloga chooses a new approach that differs somewhat from the large monochrome works on canvas which many know and which is the result of a (for Matloga) new experimental practice of collage on canvas. With the selection of smaller works — consisting solely of portraits — he shifts the scale, inviting the public to make active viewing also a personal and intimate experience. Neo Matloga (lives and works in Mamaila, South Africa and in Amsterdam) studied at the University of Johannesburg and at De Ateliers, Amsterdam. His work was on view at a.o. Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2019); Tell Freedom, 15 South African artists, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort (2018); South African Constitutional Court, Johannesburg (2016); Time Line, The Bag Factory, Johannesburg (2015); South African and Chinese exchange, Workers Museum, Johannesburg (2015). Matloga is the recipient of various awards including the Royal Award for Modern Painting in 2018 and was nominated for the Volkskrant Visual Arts Prize in 2019. Recently Matloga was the winner of the ABN AMRO Art Prize and later this year he will have an exhibition in the Hermitage Amsterdam. Em’kal Eyongakpa 17 September – 26 September Oude Kerk (Amsterdam) Oudekerksplein 23, Amsterdam https://oudekerk.nl Cameroonian artist Em’kal Eyongakpa will present a new sound installation and an alternative environment within the Oude Kerk. This work is the outcome of his artistic investigation of the relationship between water and sound. Sounds are the most important medium in Em’kal’s practice, and his ideas increasingly draw from indigenous knowledge systems, ethnobotany, applied mycology and technology. The installation is part of an ongoing project, sǒ bàtú, on which the artist has been working since 2015. Sǒ bàtú means ‘to bathe one’s ears’ in Kenyang, a language spoken in Manyu (Cameroon). Eyongakpa’s presentation takes us to an alternative world: he mixes sound recordings of nature that he made in the forests of Southern Cameroon with sound recordings that he made in the Oude Kerk. Em’kal Eyongakpa is from Cameroon. He initially trained as an ecologist and botanist and followed a residency programme at the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunst. Affected by his previous studies his work raises questions about the environment, identity and freedom. Cameroon was subject to German colonial power until after the First World War and divided between France and the United Kingdom until after 1961, which is why Eyongakpa investigates the way political structures from the past still affect society today. In his studio in the Bijlmer, which is filled with sound equipment and home-made instruments, he makes music and sound compositions together with artists, scientists and local friends. He also invites speakers to his ‘shrine’ to exchange views on subjects. Joy Mariama Smith: Black Joy/White Fragility 1 October – 24 October Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam) Witte de Withstraat 50, 3012 BR Rotterdam https://www.kunstinstituutmelly.nl/en/ Joy Mariama Smith is an Amsterdam-based movement artist, activist and educator. The artist’s work focuses on issues related to visibility, projected identities and self-representation in different contexts. Through their dance, performances, and installations, they are interested in investigating the interplay between the body and its cultural, social and physical environment. Consent and agency are an integral part of their ongoing praxis. Presented here, Black Joy/White Fragility (2021) is a performance installation that centres QTIPOC experience in club culture and the embodied aesthetics of possibility. Using bass, collective joy, consent praxis and emotional intelligence, the artist and performers collectively weave together a healing and transformative holding space for bodies of colour subjected to systemic oppression. Guiding the work is a number of questions introduced by the artist: What would it mean to create a safer space where bodies of colour, although racialised, can celebrate, heal, perform, transform, and transcend? Who would be given access to that space, who would be allies? What would the performance of a social space do to push back against injustices of white institutions? Black Joy, White Fragility is a celebratory and excavational site-specific performance installation that provides a site for black joy to be experienced and expressed. During the course of the exhibition, the club environment comes to be activated by performers, whose traces shape the installation through a process of accumulation. All performances will be scheduled in the Engage section of the Kunstinstituut Melly website. A native Philadelphian currently based in Amsterdam, Joy Mariama Smith’s work primarily addresses the conundrum of projected identities in various contexts. A sub-theme, or ongoing question in their work is: what is the interplay between the body and its physical environment? Rooted in socially engaged art practice, they are a performance/installation/movement artist, activist, facilitator, curator and architectural designer. They have a strong improvisational practice spanning 20 years. When they choose to teach, they actively try to uphold inclusive spaces. Ana Guedes 7 October – 31 October Oude Kerk (Amsterdam) Oudekerksplein 23, Amsterdam https://oudekerk.nl Ana Guedes’ work centres on the question of which stories are passed on and which are lost. At Oude Kerk she will present a new sound installation, inspired by the interplay between personal and political history as reflected in her family archive: her works are often a mix of historical and personal stories. As in earlier works, Guedes takes the record collection of her Portuguese family as a starting point for her installation in the Oude Kerk. Having travelled across three continents, this record collection reflects the migration of her family. They bought the first records in Angola in the 1960s, after war broke out in the former Portuguese colony and expanded the collection with vinyl from Portugal and Canada until the 1980s. The scratches on the records and the moth- eaten covers betray the passage of time. The records are passive witnesses to a displacement in time and space. Ana Guedes is a multidisciplinary artist born in Portugal and based in the Netherlands. In her artistic practice she combines media such as sound, video, installation and performance. She followed a residency programme at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and attended a Master Program – Master of Artistic Research at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in the same city. She has previously shown work at venues including Stroom Den Haag, De Fabriek in Eindhoven, the Playground Festival in Leuven and the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. Editors’ Notes Encouraging experimentation and creativity at the highest level, the Hartwig Art Production | Collection Fund enables artists to realise ambitious production ideas. Each year, the series of newly produced artworks will be acquired by the Hartwig Art Foundation and then donated to the Dutch national art collection (the “Rijkscollectie”). The Hartwig Art Production | Collection Fund is managed and overseen by The Hartwig Art Foundation: www.hartwigartfoundation.nl. The curatorial team for the Hartwig Art Production | Collection Fund special project 2020/2021 consists of Sharmyn Cruz Rivera, Iris Ferrer, Aude Christel Mgba, Jo-Lene Ong and Rita Ouédraogo. The artists chosen to participate in this project are Ana Guedes, Anna Dasović, Em’Kal Eyongakpa, Geo Wyeth, Joy Mariama Smith, Kent Chan, Kevin Osepa, Maria Pask, Mariana Castillo Deball, Mariëlle Videler, Neo Matloga, Ola Hassanain, Family Connection (Quinsy Gario, Glenda Martinus, Rudsel Martinus, Gala Martinus, Jörgen Gario, Caldron Lewis, Whitney Lewis, Leroy Lewis and Quinton & Shaquire Martinus), Saeeda Saeed and Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide). For the complete schedule of presentations, full artist biographies and further information please visit the respective institution’s websites and www.hartwigartfoundation.nl. For more information please contact: Rhiannon Pickles at Pickles PR [email protected] | +31 (0)615 821 202
Enter the password to open this PDF file:
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-